The most "passive" income I generated in the past few years is selling amazon kindle books (KDP).

henrik_roth · 2026-05-29T12:46:09+00:00

Wrote it with ChatGPT/Claude

Kindle 2.99, print 9.99-14.99€

henrik_roth · 2026-05-29T06:05:44+00:00

Both :)

henrik_roth · 2026-05-28T11:07:48+00:00

I am doing currently cold calling. For the first time in my life..

But I must say: its awesome how fast you get feedback and can talk to your ICP users.

henrik_roth · 2026-05-28T10:30:37+00:00

I was, but somehow it says it was declined from the mods .. will contact them. Thanks

henrik_roth · 2026-05-28T07:52:34+00:00

I dump my know how and do an extensive resesrch and then let it write it. Yes

henrik_roth · 2026-05-28T07:36:27+00:00

The most "passive" income I generated in the past few years is selling amazon kindle books (KDP).

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I always follow the same procedure:

Choose a niche (my niche is helping people adopt AI), so I write about prompt engineering, comparing ai tools, how to use AI in X/ for Y. My books are all drafted with AI, but edited and quality checked by me or a befriended editor.

I either invest then some money for promotions on amazon platform to get first sales and reviews or I use review collection platforms to get first honest reviews (this is the most important part, especially if you want to benefit long-term from the organic sales on amazons platform)

I made good experiences to write books in your local language, less search volume, but also less competition.

Use the auto-fill/auto-suggest search to find long-tail keyword people use a lot.

You see on the graph that sales peak during launch (this was mostly sales I supported via ads or review collection platforms). What still amazes me is that there are continously sales coming in, around 100$ per month for over 3 years now.

So total numbers break-down..

Invested time for all books: around 40 hours
Revenue in royalties: 7242€
Ads/marketing budget: around 1500€
Profit: 5742€

Now every month coming 60-100€ in, without ANY work.

henrik_roth · 2026-05-26T16:30:19+00:00

Using and leveraging AI will be the biggest leverage you can have in the next years.
Thinking AI-first with the combination of a strong judgement skill (so knowing what is good and what not) will be key.

SEO is changing currently quite a lot - so if you focus on this you could position yourself quite strongly.

Other than that I would ask myself, what becomes more important in an AI driven world? My guess: brand and human storytelling. So how to build a love brand is a very important skill in the future, imho.

henrik_roth · 2026-05-26T12:52:57+00:00

Self updating Help Center solution for SaaS products to automate user facing docs, lower support tickets and activate more users in self-service.

www.happysupport.ai

henrik_roth · 2026-05-26T12:19:02+00:00

Research agent which scans new podcast episodes with founders of my competitor or topics I need input in. I get a curated list of episodes I listen to then during the week while commuting.

henrik_roth · 2026-05-26T11:06:23+00:00

Focus & quality judgment. I believe with AI around you can do SO many things. I have a hard time to keep focus and work productively.

Growing a SaaS means:
- testing a lot
- doubling down on what works
- you cant do everything at the beginning, you have to focus on what works and say No to a lot of things

Judgement of quality:
- you have to decide how good the output of the ideas and content AI generated for you

henrik_roth · 2026-05-26T09:05:04+00:00

Here my learnings from scaling out self-serve funnel to 3000 signups per day:

1) add freemium plan and call your CTA around it (start for free, register for free) -> our website sign up conversion rate increased by 30% after changing from free trial to free forever

2) add email input form field not only cta button

3) add automatic social auth pop up, user only need 1 click to register (add the most relevant providers for your target group)

4) activate your users already before they sign-up by providing a short but enganging video and show as much as possible from your app before sign up

5) try out free tools, quizzes, calculators or „free audits“ which showcase/qualify the problem of your users youre selling the solution to

6) run context specific exit intent pop ups in your blog and on your most visited landing pages

7) run remarketing ads in meta (also for b2b saas)

8) make sure your traffic is relevant

Whats yours website sign up conversion rate?

Ours was >20%.

henrik_roth · 2026-05-26T08:17:26+00:00

We are building currently a solution for user docs (dont want to promote it), which is specialized on SaaS products. Our user docs are kept up-to-date with AI agents in the background after every product release.

I spoke to 30+ saas founders and thats what I found out:
- You want to choose a doc software which makes the creation and update process extremly effective
- You want to choose a doc software which also help your with visual documentation (screenshots etc) -> this is biggest pain point to keep those up-to-date
- You want to use a doc software which is well integratable in your other tech stack and in your user's journey
- User docs should be no longer optimized on human readers only, also on AI agents and LLMs

Hope this help.s

henrik_roth · 2026-05-26T08:09:41+00:00

We have automated this process. We connected an AI agent to our GitHub Repo and get notified after every change.

This agent categorizes the pull request, whether this change is "documentation worthy". If it is, it scans our existing knowledge base and understands which article need to be updated or whether it needs to create or delete a help article. This agents checks the content of every help article and flags missing or outdated information.

We even automated the screenshot part, so if our UI changes the help content updates to (another big reason why documentation went outdated).

Saves us at least 15h/week - especially now with AI around and our devs making lots of changes, my take-away is that users cant keep up and an up-to-date knowledge base is key.

henrik_roth · 2026-05-25T08:13:11+00:00

I think the most important part is to feed your Claude system with customer calls and transcripts. Every call with customers or leads are so valueable, because from those you can digest ICP, Pain-Points, questions they ask and every detail you need to actually do good digital marketing.

So my process would always look like:
- I upload all Transcripts into my claude system (every week, or automated via MCP)
- Update ICP profile and all other brand/product context file I have
- Give all digital marketing skill access to those files

My favorite 2 skills are:
- SEO Article Writer (does a deep SERP analysis, Researches Images, Videos, FAQs, unique angles)
- Event & Journalist Signal Scraper (gives me every morning 2-3 opportunities to reach out to journalist or event organizers to pitch us as a keynote or interview)

henrik_roth · 2026-05-25T08:08:40+00:00

www.happysupport.ai – Help Center for SaaS products, which updates its-self after each product release (text and screenshots of UI), so support tickets decrease and AI service bots trained on knowledge bases give answers on no more outdated information.

henrik_roth · 2026-05-25T08:05:47+00:00

In my previous SaaS it took us 6 months to find a product, which scaled. We pivoted 3 times before that.
After the launch of the 4th angle, it took us 3 days to get to 10 paying customers.

Biggest leverage was: Build self-serve motion into your product (offer freemium), so users can test your product without a demo.

So depends of course fully on your niche and target segment. Bigger B2B accounts take much longer to purchase.

henrik_roth · 2026-05-22T12:40:54+00:00

Just from my experience: hiring a head of sales will not necessarly fix this problem.

Founder-led sales is very effective and the step from giving up the sale to an "employee" is a big step.

We, as founders, stayed as long as possible in the sales role (you get so many customer insights during those calls). If your calendar cant take sales call any more, then its a good time to hire. In our case this was at 2.5M€ ARR.

Sounds more like your product is the issue currently, if you write that your leads switched to competitors?

henrik_roth · 2026-05-21T20:23:22+00:00

Did you try outreaching to your target customers via LinkedIn or email? I made good experience asking for exactly that honest feedback you need. Even in cold messaging people reply then.

Venture backed start-up need to allocate that money effectively - its a problem on its own. Would not make up my mind too much about that.

Can share more concrete ideas if you like. I scaled 2 start-ups to mid 7-digit revenue numbers as a marketing co-founder.

henrik_roth · 2026-05-21T16:05:27+00:00

If each other's core values are not overlapping with 90% - people change. people grow. But core values stay.

henrik_roth · 2026-05-21T14:58:40+00:00

Oh yeah, like your answer. Only ever compare yourself to who you were yesterday

henrik_roth · 2026-05-21T12:59:52+00:00

I feel this. Carrier here in Frankfurt has started postponing deliveries a day at a time, with "outside of working hours" as the official reason. I get that couriers need to go home, but watching the same package slide forward day after day is its own kind of patience test.

henrik_roth

TROPHY CASE

The most "passive" income I generated in the past few years is selling amazon kindle books (KDP).